- December 24, 2024 11:52 pm
- California
Angela Cusack, Founder & CEO of Igniting Success®, is understated and patient. She moves quickly as she partners with executive leaders in shaping cultures that produce deeper connections, higher engagement, and overall well-being and prosperity for all involved. Angela is an impact player. Someone whom many refer to as their “organization’s secret weapon.”
Her presence is felt throughout an organization, even if she can only be found coaching and consulting within the C-suite. The new insights, actions, and results from working with Angela undeniably impact more than just one’s professional life. She has an innate ability to create a safe and trusting space where life-altering perspectives are revealed and she has the power to shift the course of how one leads and participates in life, learning, work, and play.
Angela wholeheartedly believes that “who you are is how you lead.”
Furthermore, Angela shares in her debut book, Discover the Matrix, Integrity: The True Mark of Leadership, “that our integrity is the single most important quality that we, as leaders, must possess for a sustainable future together.
fail to align ourselves first, we simply cannot align our teams, organizations, and brand.”
Angela’s success in leading her own company and her work with others comes down to her expert insights arising from what psychologist Howard Gardner calls “searchlight intelligence: the ability to discern connections across spheres and see opportunities for cross-pollination.”
It is through her work she has mastered the science of leadership-brand-culture integration. When leaders operate in a zone where their professional principles align with what fulfills them, they can honor their true selves and lead prosperous lives. Angela refers to this as “leading and living in integrity.”
Collaboratively Designing the Future
Angela conceptualized Igniting Success® in 2005 after responding to questions from colleagues and community leaders, “How do you do what you do?” with “I am the spark that helps leaders ignite their own success by discovering their true selves.” She says, “Choosing to live in and lead with integrity isn’t easy. It takes courage and bravery to be honest and vulnerable with oneself and with those we are privileged to lead. As I often say, Igniting Success® begins and ends with you.”
As a Generative Leader, Angela is motivated by supporting people and organizations in achieving prosperity. For Angela, prosperity is more than financial gain. Prosperity is the condition of thriving and being successful by reducing the unnecessary suffering many experiences in the workplace or their lives arising from the persistent need to pretend and engage in the never-ending, exhausting game of power and politics.
“When we give up on ourselves, we not only lose our integrity, we lose our voice and unconsciously feel suppressed. We become a bystander in the game of life,” adds Angela. “You may be wondering how I discovered this truth. Just before leaving behind my very successful big corporate job, I awoke from what I call my ‘Rip Van Winkle’ 25-year slumber. I immediately asked myself, ‘What happened to the 20-year-old girl that had big dreams and believed anything was possible?’”I carried this inspiration with me as I launched Igniting Success® full-time in 2011.” And it is this feeling that continues to motivate Angela to be and bring her best every day to every client she is privileged to work with—be it a CEO, entrepreneur, family business owner, or coach.
Igniting Success® is a people-focused, global advisory firm leveraging human potential to collaboratively design futures of success for change-ready CEOs, entrepreneurs, boards, and business leaders. Angela and her team partner with executives and emerging leaders worldwide to create forward-looking organizations that flourish and endure through the success of their people.
Using collective experience and stakeholder insight, they actualize the full potential of the enterprise for the individuals who sustain it, developing integrated strategies and specialized solutions that address critical challenges and opportunities while building alignment across the organization. They do this by collaboratively teaming with their clients to sow the seeds of future success in today’s people, processes, and structures for a more agile tomorrow.
A Pioneering Leader
With such a brilliant mind, one must also learn to stay grounded and care for oneself. For Angela, it is all about being mindful and present with who she is and what she is doing at the moment. This allows her to make more purposeful choices of where to focus her energies versus falling into society’s pervasive thinking that puts multitasking on a pedestal.
For Angela and her organization, the most significant achievement has been gaining implicit trust from CEOs from various organizations across the globe. “Trust isn’t always easy to come by, especially when working with CEOs and executive teams,” she explains. “It first requires a high level of integrity within oneself that then bleeds into the relationship, and this creates a path forward for leaders to do their own work to lead with integrity.”
Igniting Success® is built on this very premise.
As Angela describes in her debut book Discover the Matrix, integrity is the true mark of leadership.
“When we live and lead with integrity, we raise our collective organizational intelligence by seeing what is often invisible. It is the intangibles within us and organizational culture that is easily overlooked or worse yet ignored. Yet, if we dare to discover what lies within the spaces between what we know, we find the magic that allows us to create an organization where there is strong leadership-culture-brand alignment,” she elucidates.
Integrity breeds trust.
Angela’s book, Discover the Matrix, Integrity: The True Mark of Leadership, is arriving on bookshelves in April 2023. For the road ahead, her second book is underway. In this book, she continues pulling the red thread of integrity through an organization’s teams and culture, connecting it to its brand and promise. With the support of her publisher, Austin Macauley, Angela expects to release Discover the Matrix, Amplify Your Teams, Culture, and Brand and the accompanying Discover the Matrix Field Guide sometime in late 2024 or early 2025. “The possibilities are endless to expand Igniting Success®’s reach and global impact. I am excited and curious to see what unexpected doors open,” she asserts.
The Unique Solutions
The company offers powerful Systems on Chips (SoCs) and a software suite for creating customized solutions. And the current flagship is HyperX Midnight, a radiation-hardened supercomputer class SoC designed for use in LEO, MEO, and GEO (low-, middle-, and geosynchronous earth orbit) satellites.
HyperX Midnight, soon after its release, became the most advanced space processor available, with roughly four times the computing throughput at half the power demand of competitive chips.
“This is a significant step, as performance and power consumption control the magnitude of a satellite. We put enormous performance in a small package with low power obligations, so our customers can use much smaller satellite busses (chassis) which conserves millions in launch budgets,” says Walt. Another key feature of Coherent’s HyperX multi-chip modules compared to its competitors is that its chips are C-programmable and use familiar tools and debugging processes. “The solutions can be built on our chip in about 6 months whereas competitive FPGA offerings usually require 24 months of development time using complex hardware development languages and a very difficult process called timing closure,” he adds.
Coherent Logix’s SoCs are also completely reprogrammable, even in space, and can modify tasks in less than 50ns (nanoseconds). These two elements combine to create a huge advantage. Coherent Logix can make four products in the time our competitors take to build just one, and we can continuously enhance those products even if they are in orbit around the Earth.
These attributes herald back to Coherent Logix’s patented invention: the HyperX fabric. And this fabric is common to all Coherent Logix’ chips – both Space-qualified and terrestrial – so these advantages are available whether users are building a satellite, 5G cellular, secure networks, AI platforms, or 8K video encoders. Coherent Logix has served the Space 2.0 and Defense markets for 15 years. High-performance computing (HPC) with low power draw, on-orbit programmability, and ease of modular multimodal MCM design are the keys to success in these markets according to Walt.
The Leader who Makes the Difference
Walt Gall, Ph.D. serves as CEO on Coherent Logix’s executive management team. He is a business leader who builds world-class AI teams, products, and strategic partnerships for top-tier start-ups (Saffron, Intel acquisition) and large corporations (Amazon Devices, Meta (formerly FB).
As CEO of Coherent Logix, the leader in low-power, high-performance C- programmable processors for the embedded systems market, he recently helped guide the company through a funding initiative that raised $85 million.
Under Walt’s leadership, in early 2023 Coherent Logix launched HyperX Midnight, the world’s most advanced space processor, with roughly four times the computing throughput at half the power demand of competitive chips. Coherent Logix is currently in its fourth generation of HyperX processors for Space 2.0 and Defense, Connected Devices, and Media & Communications industries. The company has been granted more than 375 patents and 125 patents are pending.
Over the past decade, Walt has held various leadership roles on executive teams, including Amazon Alexa AI, Meta’s AR/VR and AI divisions, and Intel AI, with responsibilities for annual operational planning, developing a 3-year strategy, and managing more than $500M R&D and production budgets. He led product launches on conversational AI voice assistants on industry-leading consumer and social media devices with cloud-to-edge embedded applications and the development of several enterprise decision-support AI/IOT solutions in wellness, health, hi-tech, and insurance sectors.
Walt’s leadership style is centered on the customer and making data-informed, timely decisions. This customer-centric team approach is critical as the company scales its products and continues to expand its channel partnerships. “I’m referring to our direct customers and strategic partners, our leadership team and employees, and our Board of Directors,” he adds. “We have a collective interest in growing revenue and partnering on developing and commercializing products that have a meaningful impact on society.”
Armed with this mindset, Walt and the rest of the leadership team have skillfully guided Coherent Logix into hypergrowth markets: Space 2.0, cybersecurity, connected devices, media and communications.
Towards the Future
Coherent Logix is adding a cloud-based capability for new customers, universities, and the Maker/open-source community to work with their development tools and hardware. With older von Neumann microprocessor architecture designs and today’s programmable hardware, the software development process is so tedious that it can take 24-36 months for a customer to develop a solution e.g., a WiFi router. Coherent Logix microprocessors, however, have C-programmability and use standard software development processes. They also offer a cycle-accurate simulation platform. These advantages enable Coherent Logix to build solutions in just six months and continue to reprogram or reconfigure as needed to support their product and customer roadmaps with new software-defined functions or as standards evolve. This, combined with the hardware/software co-design process the company uses to build their System on Chips (SoCs), brings the power of digital transformation to the design and use of digital processors – amplifying both the pace of innovation and the competitive advantages of Coherent Logix.
For the near future, Walt is striving towards building highly functioning, distributed teams to bring the most disruptive products to market he has worked on, i.e., a new class of low-power, reprogrammable, high-performance computing devices. Coherent Logix is enabling customers to “redefine hardware as software” (which is also the company’s tagline) to meet the market demand for the flexibility, extensibility, and scalability of software-defined hardware systems and their small SWaP requirements, ranging from space satellites to consumer devices. Coherent Logix’s HyperX architecture provides a paradigm shift in hardware-software co-design from embedded systems to the cloud and delivers a more cost-effective and scalable software-defined device strategy. With its compute and memory co-localized, an event-oriented, parallel processing fabric, low power profile, and C-programmability, this has a 2-4x improvement in the time it takes to develop and launch products. This multi-faceted value proposition extends product customer lifetime value economic models, increasing the ROI for its ODM and OEM partners and customers. Accomplishing these product revenue growths and customer-centric goals will lead naturally to the longer-term goal of positioning Coherent Logix for a successful market exit for its shareholders.
“The future requires low-power, high performance computing for next generation connected devices – it will be everywhere we find a sensor, a camera, a robot, or smart device. As large as the Space 2.0 revolution is, the terrestrial edge and embedded devices will eclipse it by orders of magnitude,” concludes Walt. “We must be as efficient with power as possible. It has a cost to our planet to produce, and it turns into heat when you use it. If we want to preserve our planet, smart everything must become smart, efficient everything.”
" The possibilities are endless to expand Igniting Success®’s reach and global impact. I am excited and curious to see what unexpected doors open. "
Angela Cusack
Founder & CEO
